Jake Brukhman says the U.S. directive blocking Anthropic's models proves centralized AI invites government control. He names seven projects building distributed training as the antidote.
Jake Brukhman, the founder of CoinFund, said the Anthropic export-control dispute illustrates why decentralized AI networks are gaining attention. In a June 13 post on X, he described AI models as a centralizing force and a prime target for government control. His comment followed Anthropic's compliance with a U.S. directive that suspended access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
Anthropic said the order required blocking access for foreign nationals, including foreign-national employees, both inside and outside the United States. The company disabled both models for all users while keeping other Claude models available. Brukhman linked that shutdown to the broader risk of centralized AI.
Decentralized networks can act as a counterbalance, Brukhman said, because the biggest hurdle is access to massive compute. “The answer is simple: there is enough commodity GPU compute in the world to compete on the frontier,” he wrote, adding that new training methods must tap that capacity. He named Gensyn, Prime Intellect, Bagel, Pluralis, and Nous Research as teams working on distributed training. Macrocosmos AI and Covenant round out the list. Their work shows decentralized training is possible, cheaper, and nearly as efficient as centralized systems, though technical limits remain.
Open models can be useful, Brukhman said. They often lack a revenue model strong enough to fund frontier training. Pluralis has proposed splitting model weights among participants. No single participant holds the full model. The network still provides access.
Earlier reporting showed the scale of AI infrastructure demand. Blackstone and Apollo were lining up about $36 billion in debt financing for Anthropic’s Google TPU expansion. Separate reporting on open AI infrastructure said concentrated compute access can leave whole regions dependent on a few providers.
Brukhman framed the moment as a choice. “This is the moment of truth,” he wrote, asking whether AI will fall under “censorship and unilateral government control” or move toward decentralized systems. CoinFund previously invested $158 million in decentralized AI, aiming to break Big Tech’s grip on compute and model development.
The seven projects named by Brukhman have not disclosed funding rounds this year. A fresh capital injection or a new export control on a major model would strengthen his thesis. A distributed training system producing a competitive benchmark would also shift sentiment.
Anthropic launched Fable 5 only days before the shutdown. The model had added safeguards. Some cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and distillation queries fall back to Claude Opus 4.8.
Prepared with AlphaScala editorial tooling from the source reporting linked above. Indexable analysis may include a cited Alpha Score value. Publishing checks screen each story before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.